Bill Shunn was born Donald William Shunn II in Los Angeles in 1967. He was the first of eight children in a devout Mormon family and was raised to expect to serve as a missionary when he became old enough. His early interests included astronomy, geology, paleontology, and other natural sciences. At the age of six he won a Halloween short story contest in his first-grade class and realized he wanted to be a writer.

That same year his family moved from California to Utah, where they lived in several small towns before finally settling in Kaysville in 1978. Bill commenced seven years of classical piano study around that time, and played clarinet in school bands. Some of his early stories appeared in his junior high school literary magazine, and at the age of fifteen he became serious about trying to sell his work to the professional science fiction magazines of the day. In his senior year at Davis High School, during his tenure as co-editor of the school newspaper, he scored his first extramural publication, placing the story "Cut Without Hands" in a small-press anthology of science fiction by and for Mormons, LDSF-2.

Bill graduated from high school in 1984 and began attending the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on a full academic scholarship that fall. In 1985 he was accepted to the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, a summer program in science fiction and fantasy writing. There he studied under writers including Algis Budrys, Joe Haldeman, Michael Bishop, Kate Wilhelm, and Damon Knight. His fellow students included future SF luminaries Geoffrey A. Landis, Martha Soukup, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

In 1986 Bill, confirming the hopes of his family, was called to serve the Mormon church as a missionary in the Canada Calgary Mission. He entered the Missionary Training Center in September and three weeks later began his service as an ordained minister and door-to-door proselytizer. His experiences as a missionary in Alberta, however, did not proceed as planned, and culminated in his arrest and expulsion from Canada in March 1987.

He completed his two-year term of service in the Washington Spokane Mission, rising to the rank of zone leader before his honorable discharge in August 1988. He resumed his studies at the University of Utah, graduating in 1991 with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in English. He went to work that fall for WordPerfect Corporation in Provo, Utah, where he worked on the 6.0 DOS version of the company's popular flagship word processor. Technical readers may or may not be impressed to know that he and his colleagues worked almost entirely in 80x86 assembly language.

Bill continued to write and in 1992 made his first professional sale—to former Clarion classmate Kris Rusch, who by then was editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Bill's story "From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left," a tale of choirboys at the Presidential Inauguration of 2009, appeared in the February 1993 issue of F&SF and was listed among the best SF stories of the year by both Locus and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Several more story sales followed in rapid order.

In 1995, having completed work on a novel and been laid off from WordPerfect, Bill pulled up stakes and moved to New York City, settling a stone's throw from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. He taught himself Web programming as his faith in Mormonism unraveled. Late that year he created "Mormon Matter"—the earliest incarnation of his award-winning personal Web site and one of the most infamous ex-Mormon sites of its time. He posted the story of his arrest and expulsion from Canada on his site in serial form, and "Terror on Flight 789" became hugely popular among faithful and expatriate populations alike.

Within a year and a half of coming to New York, Bill had worked his way into a position as technical producer for Rocktropolis.com, where he helped run some of the Web's earliest live concert broadcasts, including shows with the Cure, Mötley Crüe, and the Allman Brothers. He went to work as a senior developer for the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) in 1998, leaving in 2001 to accept a position with Central Park Software. He still writes and sells science fiction, and in 2002 he was nominated for the prestigious Nebula Award for his novelette "Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites." In 2003 he served as a national judge in the SF/fantasy category of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. He just completed a novel, Silvertide, and he is hard at work on yet another draft of The Accidental Terrorist, a memoir detailing his experiences in Canada.

Ironically enough for a man formerly accused of terrorism, Bill gained some small notoriety as a Good Samaritan in the wake of the September 11th attack on New York City. He created what may have been the first online "survivor registry," a site where those unable to connect with loved ones by phone could post messages saying they were all right. Bill was interviewed about the registry by such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, CNNfn, and BBC Television, and his work was profiled online at News.com, About.com, and FastCompany.com.

On June 30, 2001, Bill married Laura Chavoen at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada—the same chapel where Jon Bon Jovi wed his high school sweetheart. Their wedding continues to run in heavy rotation on the Travel Channel series "Two for Las Vegas." The newlyweds live in Astoria, Queens, where Bill spends very little time, if any, fiddling with his Web sites.